This weekend we were at a tournament at the first school I ever taught and coached at. Last year we took 1st place rather easily defeating the three other schools in the round robin tournament by double digits. This year looked to be slightly different as the host school boasted a 6'5ish" center. (I remember when he was in the 4th grade and was as tall as some of our 8th graders!) All week long we were working on specific defensive strategies to prepare for our game with him on the floor.
I have recently been disappointed with the way our guys respond to teams that we are clearly better than. We seem to think we are better than we are and tend - at this point in the season - to play down to the level of our opponents. Two of the three teams at the tournament this weekend come from small schools that traditionally had small teams and we figured that we would beat them rather easily. I was really hoping the host school would give us a good run and possibly even beat us, just to cut the guys down a level or two in their attitudes.
When we got to the tournament the first game was already going on as we walked to our room for the weekend. As we passed by the door to the gym we all noticed to absence of a player anywhere near 6' tall, let alone 6'5". We changed for our game and went back to the gym. While we were waiting outside the gym, our first opponent's coach walked up to say hi and ask me- with a grin, "How many guys do you have this year with mustaches?" He told me how last year when we played them, his point guard came to the bench at the first time out and told his coach we had guys on our team with mustaches. He then told us that we were going to kill his guys. I never really know what to say in situations like that so I just smiled and said, "We'll try not to."
We did what we could to keep my frail promise, but the match-up was just too unequal to avoid the predicted slaughter. We won the first quarter 22-0 and - with our second five in for the whole second quarter - lead 28-4. The starters got two more minutes in the third and then sat for the rest of the game as we ended up winning 42-8. There was not much to take from the game except for the great efforts we went to to get our back-up, back-up point guard some points. Alas, he did not score.
Before our next game there was a 3-point contest with each team entering 2 players. Last year we easily won this contest and there was no doubt we had the two best 3-point shooters there. Our best shooter - who was part of the winning combo last year - totally choked and we took second place. No mini-plaque this year.
Our second game of the night we matched up with a team that was much closer to us athletically, but not in discipline or ability. They ran an interesting trapping zone defense that featured two guys meeting the ball at half court- but after the initial trap they did not cover guys well and we easily broke it for lay-ups. Heading the other direction, they were the first team this year to by-pass our 3/4 court press by passing over the first two guys with passes that went to the other end's three point line. But we had our center playing safety and their guys wanted nothing to do with him. Even with their ability to get past our press, we did enough right to lead 17-8 at the end of the 1Q and 23-16 at half time.
During our break, we adjusted our press from a 2-2-1 to a 1-2-2. This left us with 2 guys back to defend their over-the-top passes. It worked better than we could have imagined, as we broke again broke a game open in the 3Q outscoring our opponent 18-4 to take a 41-20 lead into the last quarter. From there we played our bench and ended up winning 50-30.
The highlight of this game was that it was my 100th victory as a middle school boys' coach. My wife made cupcakes for all of the boys that had "100" written on them. I think our team was more excited about the cupcakes than the "monumental" occasion they represented. =)
Our final game was Saturday morning with my former school. Ever since last year's tournament - when we both featured 6'+ seventh grade centers - our boys have been looking forward to this tournament and this game, especially when we learned how big their center had grown to. We found out after our first game Friday night that their center had broken his hand Thursday night in a conference game. Without him our opponent had next to nothing to compete with us. We were slow in the first quarter - mostly due to our starters not feeling challenged (my interpretation) - and lead only 15-7. In the second quarter we broke out and went into halftime leading 33-13. The third quarter was more of the same, even with our bench in and we lead 42-15 after three quarters and ended up winning 46-24.
So, we are the reigning back-to-back champions of this tournament and we put three players on the all-tournament team. Being my first school, we love going back to see families we are very close with as well as getting an overnight, out-of-town tournament in. But all this tournament really did for us was give our bench some of their biggest minutes. We experimented one game with our starting line-up but did not face any competition. This coming week we have a conference game and then a local holiday tournament featuring the best team we played last year.
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